THE solution to the knife crime epidemic has to be proactive, not reactive.<\/p>\n
Essex Police Federation wants to see a more holistic approach to tackling the rising tide of knife possession, as new figures show over 22,000 knife and weapon possession offences were recorded over the year to March.<\/p>\n
That figure represents a steep rise of 34% since 2015.<\/p>\n
Essex Police received \u00a31.76m from the Home Office, which the force says is being spent on its anti-knife campaign Operation Sceptre.<\/p>\n
Chairman Steve Taylor said: \u201cWe would like to see the money spent on better equipment to help us deal with knife crime when we encounter it. For example, slash-proof gloves. Maybe we could be better equipped to be more proactive in the area of knife crime if we have more pieces of equipment to help us do it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe real solution for knife crime, and this is my view, is multi-agency. It\u2019s educational. It\u2019s societal. It\u2019s not just reactive. At this stage, the only part the police can play is reactive.<\/p>\n
\u201cOvertime as a solution is a one-time thing \u2013 once you\u2019ve spent that \u00a31.7million on overtime, what do you do with tomorrow\u2019s problem? Investing in equipment, in training, maybe you\u2019d get more bang for your buck.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stop-and-search is also an important tactic for officers in combatting knife and weapon possession.<\/p>\n
Steve explained: \u201c[Tactics have to] include stop-and-search. Once of the reasons, you could argue, is we don\u2019t stop-and-search as effectively as we could do, because we\u2019re on our own.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe we\u2019re less inclined to be proactive when we are single-crewed. Maybe one of the reasons is officers thinking, \u2018I don\u2019t want to stop and turn over that group of individuals there because I don\u2019t want to get stuck with a needle\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cSpending more time on patrol isn\u2019t the answer because these are not new officers. We\u2019ve not got a cupboard full of officers that we can deploy just for the issue of the day. They\u2019re officers, invariably, on overtime, [it\u2019s about] stress and workloads.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
THE solution to the knife crime epidemic has to be proactive, not reactive. Essex Police Federation wants to see a more holistic approach to tackling the rising tide of knife\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":56816,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56567"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56567"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56890,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56567\/revisions\/56890"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/56816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}